DC Rider’s Answer Line: Is this line yellow or green?

Question: It might be one of those things like that viral audio debate over whether you hear Laurel or Yanny:

Are the little bars on the signs on the side of Yellow Line trains yellow or green — or something in between?

Rider Dave Balan ran into this as he stood on a platform at Gallery Place, where both the Green and Yellow lines stop.

He doesn’t know the Metro system well enough to know if a train going to Huntington, for example, is Yellow or Green. The destination on the signs on the sides of the cars is displayed in orange. The little bar next to the name of the final stop was no help.

Yellow or green? He couldn’t tell.

“And I stared directly at it,” he said.

Why not make it clearly green or yellow?

Answer: We went over to Gallery Place. To us, the bars on the Yellow Line trains headed for Huntington looked green, which could be confusing if you’re looking to get on the Yellow Line. It’s a sort of lime green — not the darker rich green on the sides of Green Line trains. Still, it’s not clearly yellow, as it is on Metro’s route map.

Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said the bar on the Yellow Line trains looks yellow to him. He asked around the office, and others agreed. It’s yellow.

The issue hasn’t come up before, he said. But he added, “I suppose this serves as a healthy reminder that some of us see color differently or have trouble differentiating between certain colors,” he said. In fact, that’s why Metro added abbreviations like YL or GR on the legend of its maps in 2012.

Kery MurakamiKery Murakami is a reporter focusing on feature stories about those who ride and work in the Metro system. He also serves as an advocate to get the transit system to answer questions and deal with concerns raised by its customers. Follow